Filter, in photography, device used to selectively modify the component wavelengths of mixed (e.g., white) light before it strikes the film. Filters may be made of coloured glass, plastic, gelatin, or sometimes a coloured liquid in a glass cell. They are most often placed over the cameralens but can in some cases be placed over the light source with the same effect.

Ultraviolet, polarizing, and fluorescent lens filters.

Rich Niewiroski Jr.

Black-and-white films are imperfect in their colour sensitivity, and coloured filters are used to modify the light and translate the subject into gray tones that correspond to the tones seen by the human eye. Coloured filters can also brighten or darken the reproduction of coloured objects, permitting local contrast controls at the point of exposure. In colour photography, coloured filters are used to alter the colour quality of the light to match the colour sensitivity of the film.

Some light filters are used in both colour and black-and-white photography. Neutral density filters decrease the intensity of the light without affecting its colour and are used when the light intensity is too great for the correct exposure. Polarizing filters enhance colour vividness by reducing glare from the reflecting surfaces of such substances as glass and water. Colour filters are also used for colour correction in the printing process and for selecting contrast scales of multicontrast black-and-white enlarging paper.

Since filters absorb some of the light that passes through them, an increase in the calculated exposure is usually required. This increase is known as the filter factor. Modern cameras with built-in meters measure the light after the filtration and thus take the decrease in intensity into account.

Learn More in these related articles:

...practice has been to shoot the entire picture on stock balanced for artificial light at 3,200 K. Lights for filmmaking generally range between 3,200 K and 3,400 K. For daylight shooting, an orange filter is employed to counter the film’s sensitivity to blue light. Although colour-correcting filters are produced in a great many gradations, the No. 85 filter is generally used to shoot...

Filters can modify the way in which a film records colours as monochrome tone values. They are disks of coloured glass or gelatin with controlled transmission characteristics. Placed in front of the camera lens, they preferentially transmit light of their own colour and hold back light of other colours. A yellow or yellow-green filter is often used in landscape photography to prevent...

...film is the limited dynamic range between underexposure and overexposure. In order to extend this range, the holder that contains the film badge often is fitted with a set of small metallic filters that cover selected regions of the film. By making the filters of differing thickness, the linear region under each filter corresponds to a different range of exposure, and the effective...